The present invention relates to display of electronic documents and more particularly to method and apparatus for augmenting electronic document display with features to enhance the experience of reading an electronic document on a display.
Increasingly, readers of documents are being called upon to assimilate vast quantities of information in a short period of time. To meet the demands placed upon them, readers find they must read documents “horizontally,” rather than “vertically,” i.e., they must scan, skim, and browse sections of interest in multiple documents rather than read and analyze a single document from beginning to end.
Documents are now more and more available in electronic form. Some documents are available electronically by virtue of their having been locally created using word processing software. Other electronic documents are accessible via the Internet. Yet others may become available in electronic form by virtue of being scanned in, copied, or faxed. See commonly assigned U.S. application Ser. No. 08/754,721, entitled AUTOMATIC AND TRANSPARENT DOCUMENT ARCHIVING, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference.
However, the mere availability of documents in electronic form does not assist the reader in confronting the challenges of assimilating information quickly. Indeed, many time-challenged readers still prefer paper documents because of their portability and the ease of flipping through pages.
Certain tools exist to take advantage of the electronic form documents to assist harried readers. Tools exist to search for documents both on the Internet and locally. However, once the document is identified and retrieved, further search capabilities are limited to keyword searching. Automatic summarization techniques have also been developed but have limitations in that they are not personalized. They summarize based on general features found in sentences.
What is needed is a document display system that helps the reader find as well as assimilate the information he or she wants more quickly. The document display system should be easily personalizable and flexible as well.